21-year-old cops inaugural MBCC’S Culinary Arts Club’s Bakers’ Cup
GROWING up on Fustic Road, a busy commercial street in the heart of Montego Bay, has not deterred 21-year-old Davio Henry’s dream of making her mark in the field of culinary arts.
With the curtains closing to mark the end of the school year, the budding, young talent in baking was named the winner of the Montego Bay Community College’s Culinary Arts Club’s inaugural Bakers’ Cup competition.
Encouragements by friends pushed her to enter the Bakers’ Cup competition, and with just a year of professional baking under her belt, she received some 1,923 votes for her Covid-19-themed cake, to win the People’s Choice award for the competition.
For the competition, contestants were encouraged to choose between the themes COVID-19 and Online Schooling.
Henry was also the recipient of the Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism and Creative Studies’ “Spirit of Hospitality” award for the year 2021, after making a request to share a scholarship she received with other students in need.
“I got a scholarship of $100,000 from the Ministry of Education, Youth and [Information] but my school fee was already fully paid off, so I said why not just share the money with someone else,” she told the Jamaica Observer West.
“I shared [the scholarship] with one of my classmates who was not [able] to pay her tuition in full, so I gave her half of the tuition fee which was $50,000. I also met a first-year student who had just enrolled in the college, and I shared the other half with her,” Henry added.
Henry told the Observer West that her love for baking started in 2017 when she first enrolled in the western Jamaica tertiary institution.
“I [first] started baking when I started Montego Bay Community College in September 2017 after I enrolled in the Hospitality and Tourism Management course. In that first year, we had to do both baking and the culinary [arts] so I [developed] a love for baking during that time,” she said.
When tasked with the choice of choosing between tourism management and hospitality management in her second year of undergraduate studies, Henry shared that choosing hospitality management was the easiest decision she could have made as she was eager to “learn how to properly decorate cakes for [different occasions].”
Her love grew as the years went by, she said, and her time and energy were devoted to mastering what she described as her hobby. This “hobby” turned into a business due to the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic last year, birthing her very own cake business called Magical Cakes Jamaica, Henry told Observer West.
Though she is not from a wealthy family, she shared that her upbringing has been her greatest motivation to excel in everything she does, as her mother has always found a way to properly nurture her dreams from a very young age.
Now, with a bright future ahead of her, the Mount Alvernia High School past student is determined to continue her path to becoming one of Jamaica’s greatest bakers, though she has other ambitions.
“I see myself venturing off more into the baking field, but I would also like to push myself more into fashion designing and modelling because my first passion was actually fashion designing,” shared Henry. “I started sewing at a tender age of 12 years old. I worked in a factory called Hall’s Garment Producers and I was the junior seamstress there. I would go to the dressmaker there and I liked the way they manoeuvred the machines so I asked if they could teach me, and they did.
“I was then [asked if] I wanted to learn how to make my Mount Alvernia uniform, I said yes, and I learned how to sew it; all my years at Mount Alvernia, I sewed all my uniforms,” Henry told
Observer West.